William Logan Jr. (266)

William Logan Jr. (1747–17 January 1772) was a physician, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election. Born to the famed Logan family of Stenton (his grandfather, James Logan, figured prominently the development of colonial Pennsylvania), William’s future was bright from birth. After early schooling with APS Member Robert Proud, the elder William Logan sent the younger to England in 1763 to complete higher education and apprentice as an apothecary. A master of the art of gentlemanly leisure, William’s temperament inclined him toward drawing and poetry, before he determined to sate his interest in surgery. He began attending medical lectures in London in 1767 and then enrolled at Edinburgh’s famed medical school in 1768. The other element of his temperament—a volatile brew of cocksure confidence and irrepressible will—shaped his professional and personal life. Besides worrying mentors, he brushed off every possible discouragement to court for four years and then eloped with Sarah Portsmouth, the sister-in-law to one of his mentors, in 1769. Neither lacked for funds, and they seemed and turned out well-matched. The wide-ranging resistance stemmed almost singularly from Logan’s bullheaded disregard for anything but his own desires. While talented, Logan exuded an arrogance that dominates the record of his adult life: a mentor forewarned William Sr. that junior demanded a firmer hand in 1771, but the young man’s missteps had already soured his prospects among London’s leading Friends, spurring his young family to start anew in Philadelphia that same year. A sudden attack of “flying gout” killed some six months later, at the age of twenty-five, leaving behind Sarah and their first, an unborn son. (PI)